Significant energy savings without disrupting the work of frontline staff

The IT department has played a key role in Newham’s efficiency agenda, from greening the data centre and reducing the number of physical servers to reducing both the footprint and energy consumption of the client-side devices.

By implementing NightWatchman, a power management solution from 1E, on our 1,700 PCs we were able to control the amount of time a computer could stand idle, powering them down when they were not being used.

In the first year we saved £18,500, which was more than enough to pay for the project and gave us a return on investment in less than a year. In addition, we were able to show the business that this project had directly contributed to reducing carbon emissions by 143 tonnes, which equates to 264,552 KWh of electricity. This has contributed to us winning the Greenest Hospital award at the Healthcare Excellence and Leadership Awards and being a finalist in the Green IT awards 2011.

We’re now looking to deploy Nightwatchman Server Edition on our servers to measure efficiency and identify how many are not doing anything useful, with a view to decommissioning or repurposing them. It is widely believed that 15% of servers are not doing any useful work, so we expect to see more efficiency savings here.